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6waves-Lolapps Launches Its First Mobile Games Via Publishing Deals

Facebook publisher-developer 6waves Lolapps has finally made its move into mobile publishing with Yeti Town and Splode Free now live in the App Store.

Both games are puzzle titles apparently developed by smaller games studios and published by 6waves Lolapps. Yeti Town is a matching game nearly identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town; Splode Free is a music-and-color puzzle that challenges players’ sense of timing. Both games are available for free, with Splode Free’s title implying that a paid version is on its way. Splode developer Escalation Studios previously published its mobile game, Dr. Awesome, through ngmoco.

UPDATE: 6waves Lolapps tells us Yeti Town was also developed by Escalation Studios.

As more mature companies on Facebook expand their operations into both publishing and mobile game development, we’ve been curious to see whether those same companies would attempt to become publishers too. So far as we know, 6waves Lolapps is the only company that’s combined both branches of business, while developers like Zynga and Crowdstar have stuck to developing and self-publishing their own titles for mobile. (However, Zynga recently hired Sony executive Rob Dyer to be its head of partner publishing, suggesting it’s closer to marrying mobile to publishing.)

Mobile is a very different story. While traditional video game developer EA has expanded many of its own franchises onto iOS and Android, it also acquired Angry Birds-publisher Chillingo for third-party games. DeNA’s ngmoco also simultaneously maintains arms for in-house content and third-party apps. Plus, several game developers like TinyCo, Crowdstar, Gamevil and more have opened funds to tease out promising developers to partner with.

6waves Lolapps was born of a merger between Facebook publisher 6waves and Ravenwood Fair developer Lolapps. The company closed a $35 million round of funding led by Nexon shortly after the deal. The company has since launched a developer fund aimed at publishing games for both social and mobile platforms, and acquired Chinese developer Smartron5, which is currently working on both mobile and social titles.